On methodology, character assassination and Twitter (are the last two redundant?)

Posted on May 25, 2013 by bhaggart

Exhibit 6,028 on why overexposure to Twitter makes me want to take a shower:

So on Wednesday Dwayne Winseck, a communications professor and telecoms expert at Carleton University, posted a lengthy response to a journalist’s request for a methodological clarification about a report he’d written for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre’s in the Bell-Astral merger hearings in front of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. (Disclosure: Winseck is a colleague and friend with whom I’ve shared a couple of beers.)

The reporter, one Greg O’Brien, who runs cartt.ca, a website “geared specifically towards the men and women working in the cable, radio, television and telecom industries in Canada,” questioned the methodology Winseck used to measure media concentration. This is obviously a key point in a hearing that centres on whether Bell’s takeover of Astral will unduly increase media concentration in Canada. Specifically, he wanted to know why the report didn’t use the most up-to-date measure used by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice.

Winseck offered a very complete response (tl;dr: the new U.S. one isn’t an academic or universal standard, and the choice of scale didn’t change the underlying results). He also included some comments to the effect that:

I tapped out a response for you last Friday (May 17) shortly after receiving your query but then thought best to wait a few days until the proceedings in the Bell Astral case closed before sending it. Oddly, the wait was opportune because I see that Bell raised exactly the same point that you did about the HHI in its final reply yesterday (Tuesday, May 21; see Bell Final Reply, page 2).

So, good question, to be sure, and either you and Bell have great minds that think alike or there’s something else going on, but let’s put aside that unseemly prospect, at least for this post, and trust that you’ve come by your query honestly.

Not knowing the deep history of the Bell Astral case, or O’Brien’s background, I ignored the insinuation that O’Brien had been fed the question by Bell and instead focused on the substance, which was convincing and, more importantly, an honest engagement with his questioner. It was a fair question, and people can disagree about methodology. What’s not to like?

Fast forward to yesterday, when O’Brien attacks Winseck on Twitter, not just for insinuating that his question had come from Bell

@mediamorphis 2 There was and is no communication, at all, between #BellAstral and I. None. I would thank you to stop lying about that.

but on his response

.@mediamorphis 4 I think the response you published to my question is mostly utter bullshit.

.@mediamorphis 5 You want to use US gov’t standards to calculate media concentration but…

and then alleges that he cooked the results

.@mediamorphis 5a …Your paper ignored the fact those standards changed in 2010, likely b/c it didn’t support your conclusions.

.@mediamorphis 6a I think you just didn’t realize the standards had changed and you published yesterday’s tap-dance as a way out because…

.@mediamorphis 6b …if you were a decent researcher, you’d have explained all you said yesterday DIRECTLY in the paper submitted…

.@mediamorphis 6c …About why using the old #s was necessary, but you didn’t. The paper acts as if the old #s were still the standard…

.@mediamorphis 6d …And that was not addressed until your post yesterday.

From my own experience as a journalist, I know that reporters often ask questions that they’ve been suggested (or, less generously, fed) by people on the opposite side of an issue. I did it when I was working as a reporter and when I was interviewing people for my PhD. But I also know how the publication you work for has a tendency to influence the focus you put on a story. So from that POV I can sort of see how O’Brien could get his back up on being accused of bias for doing that.

That’s all, I should note, without knowing the specifics of the relationship between Winseck and O’Brien. But I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

That said, O’Brien’s response – particularly given that it was in a public venue – was inappropriate and highly unprofessional on at least two levels.

First, so what if someone thinks you’re taking questions from an industry source? A reporter accused of bias? Grab a soother and get in line; it comes with the territory. Sometimes the accusation comes from a partisan, other times it comes from an unfamiliarity with how journalism happens. Either way, what does a reporter, whose livelihood depends on getting people to talk (and to explain things to them) have to gain from insulting someone in public? Especially someone who is likely to have knowledge or contacts that may come in handy in the future?

Would it have been so hard to smile, even through clenched teeth, say thanks (sincerely; this wasn’t the type of post you just throw together) for a substantive response and move on, instead of throwing a hissy fit that had nothing to do with the substance of the issue under discussion?

Which brings us to the second point, O’Brien’s accusation that Winseck deliberately “ignored the fact those standards changed in 2010, likely b/c it didn’t support your conclusions.” At first glance, this is really over the top, especially since
Winseck points out that the choice of scale didn’t affect his paper’s findings. Quite frankly, it also doesn’t cast O’Brien in the best light when it comes to suspicions that he may have it in for Winseck, for whatever reason.

But what’s nice about this accusation is it allows us to move from feelings and insinuations to substance. Winseck has defended his report on Twitter and in a lengthy blog post. O’Brien is accusing Winseck of ignoring the new guideline “likely b/c it didn’t support your conclusions.”

This kind of dishonesty is a serious charge, at least in academia. Winseck has given his defense, showing that this report’s findings aren’t sensitive to the choice of scale. If O’Brien is going to accuse someone of cheating, it’s incumbent on him to show how the choice of thresholds doesn’t support Winseck’s conclusions. Otherwise, if I were a cartt.ca subscriber, I’d be wondering about the quality of information I’m getting.

At the end of the day, I know this is just people behaving badly on Twitter, and criticizing it is kind of like criticizing Rob Ford for making an ass of himself. But wouldn’t it be nice if we (reporters and academics) stopped snarking on Twitter and tried focusing on substance?

ETA: And, of course, the cartoon is from xkcd.

Posted in A futile plea for civility on teh Internets | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Politics and Economics: The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of the Social Sciences

Posted on March 26, 2013 by bhaggart

Or they should be. I’ve never understood the antipathy between the two disciplines. If you’re studying economic phenomena you better have an understanding of both their mechanics (economics) and their context (politics).

Anyway, I’m posting this mainly as a reminder to myself, because I plan to steal use this tasty quote next year when I’m introducing a new batch of students to the study of the Global Political Economy.  Cosma Shalizi on the main problem with “left neoliberalism” (via Henry Farrell; links removed):

“When you tell us that (1) the important thing is to maximize economic growth, and never mind the distributional consequences because (2) we can always redistribute through progressive taxation and welfare payments, you are assuming a miracle in step 2.”

For where is the political power to enact that taxation and redistribution, and keep it going, going to come from? A sense of noblesse oblige is too much to hope for (especially given how many of our rich people have taken lots of economics courses), and, for better or worse, voluntary concessions will no longer come from fear of revolution.

Right on!

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What would copyright law look like if economists held the pen?

Posted on March 19, 2013 by bhaggart

So yet another study finds that there is a small, positive correlation between illegal downloading and music sales (h/t Geist, Knopf, Torrent Freak and others). In basic English: Illegal downloads don’t harm music sales. Let’s put it even more simply: At the very least, piracy does no harm to music sales, and may even help them.

In a world of rational policymaking, these findings would land like a bombshell. Studies like this undercut the entire rationale for the past decade-and-a-half of global copyright reforms. The very existence of copyright is based on the assumption that stronger protection = more creation. And yet studies like the one linked to above suggest that this relationship doesn’t hold.

In their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine compare intellectual property to the mercantilist approach to trade that was undercut by David Ricardo’s revolutionary notion of comparative advantage in the 1800s. Like the situation today with intellectual property, mercantilism was defended by interest groups that benefited from the dominant regime even as economists like Ricardo and Adam Smith demolished mercantilism’s flimsy intellectual foundations (as it then existed).

Eventually, Smith and Ricardo won the argument. Will the same thing happen with intellectual property? I have no idea. It would be a nice start if we, as copyright scholars, at the very least, began all discussions of copyright reform not from the starting point of the law as it currently stands, but from empirical considerations about the actual effects of copyright law on the market for creative works. Maybe it’s time we all started thinking like economists.

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SOPA and online social movements: Thinking transnationally, acting locally

Posted on March 5, 2013 by bhaggart

Just noticed that Susan Sell, a big influence on my own studies – her Private Power, Public Law (online for free at the link!) was one of the starting points for my dissertation – has cited me in an article on the SOPA protests (h/t Sara Bannerman). This has spurred me to finally put said cited paper online. It’s something I presented at last year’s Canadian Communication Association meeting on the lessons of the 2007-08 Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook protests. In many ways the FCFC was a precursor to future social media-based protests, including SOPA, ACTA and even the Arab Spring. It was also one of the first of its kind in the world, and definitely the first in Canada.

It’s currently morphing into a journal article that uses the FCFC movement to think about how digital technologies have changed (or haven’t) the logic underlying social movements. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning a bit more about the factors influencing the success (albeit not total) of the FCFC movement, feel free to check it out. I even plan to put it on SSRN one day, once I figure out how the registration system works.

As for Sell’s, if you can get past the paywall (a sad irony given the subject), hers is a very interesting article placing the SOPA takedown within a transnational, social-movement perspective, focusing on the ability of transnational networks to move rapidly from the domestic to the global.

It may be because I just got back from Mexico, where I was interviewing local Internet activists who convinced the Senate to vote unanimously against ACTA in 2011 (long before the SOPA and European ACTA protests), but it’s interesting that the transnational networks Sell highlights feature exclusively European and American actors. More than one person I talked with in Mexico has noted that the Mexican victory against ACTA is almost wholly absent from the ongoing copyright/IP/net neutrality discourse.

Beyond what this means for the structure of these networks (maybe they’re not so much transnational as Euro-American), the lack of attention to this case is a huge oversight, given the stakes for developing countries when it comes to intellectual property and building civil society.

I mean, I guess it’s nice to have the field to yourself, but anyone who’s studying developing countries and civil society, online activism, and engagement with international treaties (to name only a few subjects) should be all over this story.

I still wonder whether it makes more sense to think of the SOPA and ACTA protests as transnational protests with domestic aspects, or as national protests with transnational aspects. Theoretically, I keep coming back to Randall Germain and Michael Kenny’s (also paywalled) question about whether you can have a “global civil society” without having a “global state.” To get all jargony for a second, this is tied up Gramsican notions of hegemony, a key concept for Sell, who offers SOPA as a “hard case” of transnationalism as a “‘potential hegemonic force against vast material resources and state power’.”

I haven’t written up my results yet so these are just some unformed thoughts. In both cases, there’s no denying that there was some sort of transnationalism in play. How important is it? I have no good answer yet.

Anyway, the whole thing is definitely worth mulling over, and Sell’s article is a really helpful contribution to the debate.

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ACTA comes to Canada: Will protests follow?

Posted on March 5, 2013 by bhaggart

On Friday the Conservative government introduced legislation that would implement the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (h/t Geist). Four quick comments:

  • The government’s being a bit sneaky with its briefing materials. C-56 primarily amends the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act, but you’ll have to look long and hard to find any reference to copyright in the government’s briefing materials. It’s all trademarks, all the time.

Could it be that the government doesn’t want to draw attention to the fact that it wants to get border guards to become copyright cops? Copyright law is so complicated that copyright lawyers have a hard time agreeing on what core concepts like “fair dealing” actually mean. Is this really something that we want our border guards (who should be concerned with dealing with actual threats to Canadian security) to be enforcing?

  • Despite ACTA’s unpopularity elsewhere, this bill shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. This is still the same government that followed the U.S. lead on providing very strong protection to digital locks in their 2012 copyright reform bill despite a huge public outcry.
  • I would be very surprised if Canadians took to the streets to protest it. The normally astute Mike Masnick wonders: “It’s really amazing that they’re willing to open this can of worms, given just how strongly people fought back against ACTA elsewhere.” Things get a bit clearer, though, when we remember what these people were fighting against and then look at the actual bill. The protests in Europe and Mexico, as elsewhere, were almost exclusively focused on ACTA’s digital-copyright angle and its effects on online freedom and privacy.

This digital lightening rod is conspicuously absent from (at least) the copyright bits of C-56 (the protests also weren’t very focused with ACTA’s trademark angle). There might be a lot that’s wrong with the bill, but the lack of anything affecting online activity directly will probably mute any public outrage. People (like myself) who thought we’d been witnessing a sea change in the public’s view of copyright, as opposed to rising concern for digital rights, should pay very close attention to how the public reacts to this bill.

  • One brief reminder/clarification about Mexico and ACTA. A lot of the online ACTA commentary is treating the 2011 rejection of ACTA by the Mexican Senate as a fait accompli. I’m working on a paper on this, so I’ll have more later, but ACTA is far from dead in Mexico. Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderón signed it in July 2012, and the conditions that led the Senate to unanimously condemn the treaty (they never rejected it, since it’s never been formally sent to them) no longer hold, in part because of the election-related turnover in Senate membership. It could still end up in the Senate, and the people I talked with seemed to think that there’s a good possibility that it could pass, though that’s far from certain.

Never a dull moment…

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